“We may have differences with Vladimir Putin but I have not forgotten and will never forget that the Russian people gave millions of lives [during World War II]. I told Vladimir Putin that as the representative of the Russian people, he is welcome to the ceremonies.”

- French President François Hollande, May 8, 2014.

It was never a good idea to invite Vladimir Putin to join the 70th-anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings on June 6. But the justification now offered by the French government makes the original mistake a great deal worse.

As Putin prepares for the Normandy ceremonies, his hirelings are attempting to provoke violence and disrupt elections in Ukraine. Putin justifies his government’s actions against Ukraine as necessary to resist Ukrainian “fascists.”

This represents an audacious inversion of reality. In free presidential elections on May 25, about 2 percent of Ukrainians cast their ballots for the ultra-nationalist parties Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. In elections that same day to the European Union parliament, France’s xenophobic and anti-Semitic National Front collected 25 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Putin himself has emerged as the chief paymasterand inspiration for Europe’s far-right parties.

In Putin’s distorted version of reality, those Ukrainians who demonstrated for a liberal, democratic, and European-oriented future are vilified as neo-Nazis. The Russian-backed thugs and goons who violently attack them are saluted as the heirs to the anti-Nazi resistance.

This inversion may be audacious, but it is not new. For almost half a century after 1945, Soviet leaders vilified any and all resistance to their rule over Eastern Europe as fascist by definition. Social democrats, Catholics, peasant populists, and monarchist conservatives: fascists all. At the same time, the Soviets redefined the war against Nazi Germany as a specifically Russian struggle. The millions of war dead inside the Soviet Union—many of them Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, and other national minorities—were boldly relabeled as “Russians” all. When François Hollande salutes Vladimir Putin as the heir and legatee of the wartime Grand Alliance, he repeats and ratifies this antique and deceitful propaganda.

In the context of 2014, this propaganda is especially dangerous. The Soviets reinvented World War II as a Russian war to deliberately discredit any expression of nationalism in their largest subject-nation, Ukraine. If the Ukrainians were all Nazis, then a bid for Ukrainian independence must be a Nazi project. That was a highly useful idea for the Soviets in the postwar era. It’s a useful idea for Vladimir Putin again today.

If collaboration with the Nazis in the 1940s discredited a nation’s right to self-government in the 2010s, then France itself would forfeit its rights.

And yes, the Nazis did indeed recruit collaborators inside Ukraine. Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazi invasion in 1941 as a liberation from Soviet rule. Some committed vicious atrocities against Poles and Jews. Some opportunistically served whichever side seemed to be winning at the moment. Some heroically sacrificed themselves to win a global victory for freedom in which their own country would not share.

The same story could be told almost everywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. If collaboration in the 1940s discredited a nation’s right to self-government in the 2010s, then France itself would forfeit its rights.

Putin’s approach is to claim for Russia all that is creditable in Soviet history—and then to present Russians as the principal victims of every Soviet crime and atrocity, when those crimes are not outright excised or denied. Yet 7 million Ukrainians wore the uniform of the Red Army during World War II. If Putin is entitled to a place on the Normandy reviewing stand to honor the contributions of Russians in 1941-45, why not also invite Ukraine’s president-elect—and, for that matter, Kazakhstan’s and Uzbekistan’s and those of all the successor republics of the Soviet Union? Are too many of those leaders thugs and crooks? Well, what else is Putin? If it’s too embarrassing to invite President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, it ought to be too embarrassing to invite his patron.

In 1994, French President François Mitterrand—himself a former collaborationist—declined to invite Germany’s Helmut Kohl to the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The excuse was that the day belonged only to the victorious Allies. (The true motive seems to have been to remind newly reunified Germany to mind its Ps and Qs.) Since then, a more charitable spirit has prevailed. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined French President Jacques Chirac to commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-Day. In explaining the invitation and his decision to accept, Schroeder wrote that on D-Day, “France was liberated from German occupation and we Germans from the Nazi tyranny. This day is much more than victory or defeat. It has become a symbol of the struggle for freedom, democracy and human rights. It is only right that we Germans take part.” That decision seems just and generous today. And it explains why all the states of democratic Europe deserve an invitation to share the memory of the day—and why Vladimir Putin doesn’t.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.